The Pedagogical Question
Paulo J S Bittencourt
A taboo that essentially has to do with the religious phenomenon plagues us. This is not, however, the Freudian thesis that postulates two basic prohibitions as triggers of religion in remote times in the history of humanity, namely, that of sensuality and that of the killing of the totemic animal. Despite using allegorically the pair of concepts that consecrated Freud’s essay, the associations between taboo and totem here are used for another purpose; They do not, therefore, reproduce the approaches of the father of psychoanalysis. The taboo we are referring to is of a pedagogical nature. It consists of the relevance of including or not religious education in the classroom, both in the basic education curricula of public schools and eventually in the higher education curricula.
This topic is the subject of endless controversy. Two diametrically opposed positions drive the confusion. When they fight each other, they work hand in hand without knowing it, in the service of the same purpose: the increasing crystallization of the taboo itself, which is then fed back by the dispute itself, in a vicious circularity. Unable to distance themselves epistemologically from their own assumptions, these positions embody a combative, cross-functional spirit.
At one end of the conflict, there is the believer-doctrinal stance. Driven by misunderstanding or intolerance, if not both, its defenders are unable to accept the secular nature of the public space in schools and the academic-scientific approach in universities. Precisely for this reason, they see in the insertion of religious education not only the tacit and unquestionable acceptance of religiosity as a natural and normative phenomenon. (“Religion is taught because one cannot be non-religious.”) They also advocate the study of the topic from a proselytizing-catechetical perspective [note: The Cathechetical perspective is relating to religious instruction given in preparation for Christian baptism or confirmation]. Hence, they generally consecrate one creed to the detriment of the others. In this case, the religious confession to be adopted is almost always that of the predominant religion in the country. In fact, here, there is no scientific treatment of belief as a cultural phenomenon. One is encouraged, through the study of religion, to simply believe.
As if that were not enough, the believer-doctrinal approach brings formally religious practices into the classroom, from praying to devotional readings of sacred texts. It is almost always an instrumental approach to religious teaching, which aims, in turn, at religious conversion as a path to moralizing behaviors and customs. “Only religious people can be moral”, is what they usually say. From this perspective come other reactive misunderstandings regarding the secular nature of the State and public space. One of them lies, for example, in the refutation of any and all attempts to exempt public spaces from religious symbols, under the argument that supporters of the State’s secularism are totalitarian propagators of atheism. Their spokesmen therefore do not understand that a secular state and an atheist state are two completely different realities. Isn’t civil society predominantly religious? What inconvenience would there be in adopting practices and symbols of the most expressive religious confession of a national religion in public offices?
But there is another, even more compromising manifestation that prevents the full secularization of the public sphere at the beginning of the 21st century. Here is its argumentative construction. Is freedom of expression not constitutionally guaranteed to citizens in a secular State? Why wouldn’t religious citizens speak out for their confessional dictates when drafting laws? Arguments of this order are used, for example, in challenging bills that do not comply with the precepts and dogmas of religious denominations. These would be the well-known cases of resistance to the fully legal recognition of same-sex civil unions and the decriminalization of abortion.
The neo-atheist Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, when referring to the secularist founders of post-colonial India, especially the religious Gandhi and the atheist Nehru, quotes from the latter one of the most masterful considerations about the secularism of the State, made here in relation to the Secular India so dreamed of by the former: “We talk about a secular India […] Some people think this means something contrary to religion. Obviously this is not correct. What this means is that it is a state that honors all beliefs equally and gives them equal opportunities; India has a long history of religious tolerance […] In a country like India, which has many beliefs and religions, it is not possible to build real nationalism except on the basis of secularism.”
It seems to me that, here, Nehru points to one of the fundamental premises not only of the secularism of the modern State but also of a possible approach, in the same spirit, to the religious phenomenon in the public educational sphere, namely, that of the secular-scientific approach, the core of which will, in turn, deserve its own explanation in the next reflections in this column, but not without first explaining the terms of the other side of the conflict.
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Professor Paulo Bittencourt is a brilliant teacher of Ancient and Medieval History at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul UFFS [Erechim Campus], Brazil. He contributes articles regularly, and is a columnist of a periodical too. He has several books to his credit. He is an ardent student of Vedanta.